After reception at the processing plant, sugar beet roots are washed, mechanically sliced into thin strips called cossettes, and passed to a diffuser or extraction tower to extract the sugar content into a water solution.
Diffusers are long vessels of many meters in which the beet slices go in one direction while hot water goes in the opposite direction. The movement may either be caused by a rotating screw or the whole unit rotating, and the water and cossettes move through internal chambers. The three common designs of diffuser are the horizontal rotating, inclined screw, and vertical screw “Tower.” Modern tower extraction plants have a processing capacity of up to 17,000 metric tons per day. A less common design uses a moving belt of cassettes, with water pumped onto the top of the belt and, poured through. In most cases, the flow rates of cassettes and water are approximately equal to a 1:2 ratio. Typically, cassettes take about ninety minutes to pass through the diffuser, while the water takes forty-five minutes. These countercurrent exchange methods extract more sugar from the cassettes using less water than if they merely sat in a hot water tank for a period of time. The liquid exiting the diffuser is called raw juice. The color of raw juice varies from black to a dark red depending on the amount of oxidation, which is itself dependent on diffuser design.
The used cossettes, or pulp, exit the diffuser at about ninety-five percent moisture, but low sucrose content. Using screw presses, the wet pulp slabs are then pressed down to seventy-five percent moisture. This recovers additional sucrose in the liquid pressed out of the pulp and reduces the energy needed to dry the pulp. The pressed pulp is dried and sold as animal feed, while the liquid pressed out of the pulp is combined with the raw juice or, more often, introduced into the diffuser at the appropriate point in the countercurrent process. Another byproduct, vinasse, is used as fertilizer or growth substrate for yeast cultures.
During diffusion, a portion of the sucrose breaks down into invert sugars. These sugars can undergo further breakdown into acids. These breakdown products are not only losses of sucrose, but also have knock-on effects reducing the final output of processed sugar from the factory. To limit thermophilic bacterial action, the feed water may be dosed with formaldehyde and control of the feed water pH is also practiced. Attempts at operating diffusion under alkaline conditions have been made, but the process has proven problematic. The improved sucrose extraction in the diffuser is offset by processing problems in the next stages.
There are benefits in using a pulp-size optimizer in sugar beet processing facilities which have to slice beets and must produce so-called slabs of the sugar beets in order to obtain continuous operation in sugar extraction system: For example, sugar beet slabs will be more thermo stable and allow the countercurrent flow which will allow the extraction of the sucrose. During the period of beet processing, normal beet cossette size using prior art processes often simply plug the extraction systems due to the thermal influence, creating just “mush” and prohibiting counter current juice flows in the system.
 For the reasons advanced above, there exists a need for a pulp optimizer apparatus for optimizing the size of used cossettes or pulp which are by-products of processes from extracting sugar from sugar beets.